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Black Soot May Be Aiding Melting In the Himalayas
Hugh Pickens writes "The Himalayas, home to some 10,000 glaciers, are the main source of replenishment to lakes, streams, and some of the continent's mightiest rivers, on which millions of people depend for their water supplies. Since the 1960s, the acreage covered by Himalayan glaciers has declined by more than 20 percent with a rate of warming twice the global average over the past 30 years. Now Live Science reports that tiny particles of pollution known as 'black carbon' — and not heat-trapping greenhouse gases — may be causing much of the rapid melting of glaciers in the Himalayas. 'Tibet's glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate,' says James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. 'Black soot is probably responsible for as much as half of the glacial melt, and greenhouse gases are responsible for the rest.' The circulation of the atmosphere in the region causes much of the soot-laden air to 'pile up' against the Himalayas. The soot mixes with other dust from nearby deserts, creating a massive brown cloud visible from space that absorbs incoming solar radiation. As this layer heats up in the Himalayan foothills, it rises and enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the mountain range."
continent's mightiest rivers, on which millions of people depend for their water supplies.
It is more like hundreds of millions.
839*929
(A + !B) != (A + B)
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Feeding a lame troll, but the source of soot is the same source as the CO2. So we're still solving the same problem. And they've already noted that the melting in the Himalayas is abnormally fast, but that doesn't change the fact that all the glaciers are melting, if "only" half as fast as the Himalayas.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
How long until the Abominable Smog Man evolves?
rewriting history since 2109
...which links to a god damn diagram, not an actual picture from space of a massive brown cloud. Way to fail submitter.
i wasn't sure to believe until i saw the proof:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/himalayan_glaciers_h.jpg
Then I got very confused...
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
We have already noticed problems with soot. In fact I recall reading books about terraforming where soot was sprinkled on an ice cap, so the idea is pretty old.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
'Black soot is probably responsible for as much as half of the glacial melt, and greenhouse gases are responsible for the rest.'
Becomes:
Now Live Science reports that tiny particles of pollution known as 'black carbon' — and not heat-trapping greenhouse gases (...)
Quite shameless. I am almost impressed by the gall of the submitter...
Don't all apocalypse movies start with ominous scientific discoveries in remote geographical locations?
I hereby predict that within 4 or 5 years the UN will unveil a scheme to Save Mankind from, ummmmmmm, a passing neutron star. The scheme will feature a 1000 MT hydrogen bomb, spaceships, and short wave radio. Nicolas Cage, some hot babe, and a cute kid will survive...on Mars!
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I'll admit I didn't read the article, but I don't understand how this is supposed to work.
If glaciers are responsible for the water supply, then if they don't melt, would these regions end up with no water at all?
Shouldn't these areas be depending on current precipitation for their water?
Or to put it another way, if these regions are depending on glacier melt from water accumulated hundreds of thousands of years ago, aren't they going to be screwed sooner or later? Either the melt isn't high enough and they don't have enough water, or the melt is too high and they'll run out later.
It would seem like the only sustainable situation would be if the melt equals new formation due to precipitation.
underneath we will have a shitstorm of politically biased comments
so i offer a third option, to climate change doubters and climate change believers:
1. who fucking cares whose fault it is
political recrimination gets us nowhere. its cold in the house because someone left the window open? ok, so you're going to sit there and scream at each other over who opened the window? here's a new idea: how about someone demonstrating actual responsibility and instead actually stand the fuck up, walk over, and close the fucking window: NO MATTER WHO LEFT IT OPEN
2. who fucking cares if we are heating up or cooling down or not changing
the fact is, we live here, and we are interested in controlling the thermostat. if it gets too cold, do something to turn it up. if it gets to hot, do something to turn it down. we are homo sapiens, this what we do: we do not adapt to our environment, we adapt our environment to us. we do not grow fur, we make clothes. we do not enter torpor at midday, we invent air conditioning
if you say we shouldn't mess with the weather, you are by extension denying the fact that we already are having an effect on the climate. so we might as well get involved with twiddling with the environment ON PURPOSE, because the notion that 6.5 billion humans can magically have no effect at all is a completely absurd premise on your part
this environmental attitude is the engineer's approach. fuck all of you capitalists, politicians, activists and hysterical whiners. the engineer will prevail here, because only we have the solution to what the rest of you simply bicker about
we need scientifically, factually sound well-researched methods for forcing change on our planet on purpose. and then we'll fix your fucking problem. something like seeding the dead zones of the ocean with iron
lets put it this way: make believe, for the moment, for the sake of argument, regardless of your beliefs, that
1. the earth is actually heating up
2. it is doing so because of nature, not man-made reasons
ok, well what are we supposed to do, just accept rising sea levels, melting glaciers and the sahara desert growing 25%?
no, we artificially introduce methods for cooling the earth down. we do this, #1, for selfish reasons, but also for #2: a preservation of current species and ecosystems, as a side effect. are you going to let the amazon dry up because you don't like the idea of man fiddling with the environment?
yes, the planet could continue to evolve new species without human intervention. but what is really going to happen is that this planet is going to become a museum, under human supervision, of the current catalog of species and ecosystems that have evolved so far. why? because we want to fucking live here, that's why
so, for the deniers in opposition to supposition #1 above: if you don't believe the earth is heating up, you still have to admit the earth has had historic swings in climate, and that we earthlings will have to intervene at some point, correct?
and for the believers in man-made change in opposition to supposition #2 above: you believe that climate change is caused by man, you have to admit that to fix the problem we have to do it PROACTIVELY. please don't try to sell me the moronic bullshit that 6.5 billion humans can live on this planet like ghosts. this is a different kind of denial than those who deny climate change, but no less foolish
imagine that: no pointless recriminations and blame games, no living in denial and sticking your head in the sand
commence with the retarded partisan bickering anyway. meanwhile, us engineers will roll up our sleeves and will actually go and fix your fucking problem while you political assholes do nothing but bicker
more action, less "hot air"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is pretty old news. I think I've seen reports of this at least as far back as 2003. But it's estimated that this effect is only 25% of global warming. Green house gases are most of the rest. And, yes, it doesn't necessarily take a huge increase in global temperatures to get the glaciers melting.
So we're still solving the same problem.
But filtering soot by adding smokestack scrubbers (which 1st world countries started doing many decades ago) is a heck of a lot cheaper and less disruptive than destroying the world economy to eliminate CO2.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The right wingers will surely use this as "proof" that global warming is wrong.
AGW skeptics have known about Asian black soot for 2-3 years. (It's also been found in Arctic pack ice and in the Colorado Rockies.)
I'm just glad that the "mainstream" has finally "noticed" it.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It doesn't matter who wins the argument.
Whatever is going to happen doesn't really care about whether you're right or not. If there's global warming then it's going to have consequences, even if not a single person wants to believe it.
/me is cueing the monty python references
Cry me a river about lost corporate profits.
You haven't addressed the secondary issue; that the melting in the Himalayas is only doubled by the soot, not caused by it. And the scrubbers would have little to no effect on glacier melt in the rest of the world. And that "destroying the world economy" is a politically motivated, short sighted conclusion. Most of the reasonable forecasts show it "dragging" the economy down by about 1-3% of the "GWP" (Gross World Product). The economic doomsday types like to discount the possibility that the cost of oil will increase much beyond the rate of inflation, as if the entire world can start living like Americans (or even Western Europeans) without drastically increasing the price of oil.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Aerosal pollution over India and Bangladesh--2001
Haze over China--- 2003
Haze along the Himalaya Front Range --2004.
Smog over the bay of Bengal-- 2006
Cry me a river about lost corporate profits.
OK, one more time. "Companies don't pay taxes, their customers do!"
So, look around you and pick out all the items in your life that are made by corporations and try to see how it will affect you to pay a little more for each of them and the power it takes to run them.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Poe's Law strikes again!
I'm not the trickle down economics type...in fact I'm fervently the opposite...but you do realize that corporations will find their way to make money one way or the other. If you spend millions on technology to be green, you'd be a fool to think that they're not going to make up for the money elsewhere...mainly through eliminating jobs or investing in new technologies to eliminate existing jobs. While I would like to think that most people are generally good and think about the masses before themselves, you're dealing with companies with thousands of shareholders. At the end of the day they answer to the shareholders, not Al Gore.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
The right wingers will surely use this as "proof" that global warming is wrong. Yet... if we started using renewable energy, it would still solve the problem.
It's actually the Libertarians that are pushing much of this. They are currently allied with the "right wingers" as many of their goals are the same (smaller government, free market, local control).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
the earth has had historic massive swings in climate, without any manmade input
obvious deduction:
even if you isolate all human effects, you're still going to have a dangerous heating up or cooling down at some point
therefore:
you are going to be involved in this sort of purposeful engineering at some point, no matter what humanity's effects are. the alternative is to just allow an ice age or the sahara covering half the globe and massive ecosystem/ species die off. that neglect is a superior approach?
so why not just sidstep all the pointless bickering and pointless blamegames and get down to proactive engineering now
we're going to be engineering our climate some day even if we all magically turn into environmental saints. you see that right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Cry me a river about lost corporate profits.
Says he who doesn't realize that Eeeeevil Corporate Profits are what
Or are you too young to remember why the Iron Curtain fell, and why so many (non-union) citizens welcomed (nay, screamed for) government privatization: government bureaucracies do an absolutely suck-ass job of providing services.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
of the results of your actions in a complex situation
but you proceed anyways, because the alternative, doing nothing, is guaranteed to fail
what you seek: certain results from new strategies, is an impossibility, and should therefore never drive your decision making
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They could try getting glaciers to "marry" and produce children.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/in-paper-magazine/sci-tech-world/glaciers-at-risk
http://www.umb.no/statisk/akrsp/06_publications_and_presentations/03_phd_and_masters_theses/5_ingvar_tveiten.pdf
The scientific bunch call it seeding. But the bunch who've been doing it for generations (way before the scientists figured it out) call it marrying.
we aren't seeing the massive deluge that was predicted
Can you just help me out real quick and post a few links to these predictions of a deluge?
Much appreciated.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The linked diagramm is a dead giveaway that this is more of a PR stunt than usefull scientific research. No matter what the verdict, fact is: we are putting to much polution into the atmosphere and we need to stop. That's a fact, and no lobbying otherwise will change it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
the ability to plunge the entire planet into winter: just detonate all of our nuclear warheads
we won't do that. i'm simply countering your supposition that the earth is large and we are small. we WERE once so small as you believe. we aren't anymore
we're simply not going to accept the next ice age or the next sahara age. we're going to actively prevent it. when the amazon is drying up, and the taiga is melting, and the streets of london and shanghai are as venice, we will find the industrial, scientific and political willpower to oppose that
simply because massive ecosystem change will imperil billions on this planet and their economic well-being. we will therefore assemble to resist climate change. this is what we do: we are homo sapiens. we do not adapt to nature. nature adapts to us
if you don't understand or believe we have the power to alter our ecosystem, or that for some reason we won't alter our climate when climate change threatens us, manmade or natural, then you are in some sort of serious denial about what kind of creature we really are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Acreage"? Really? What's wrong with "surface area"? Should we now call length "footage", and volume "gallonage"?
At the very least use SI square meterage. ;-)
Please don't buy a single thing made by a corporation/containing a part made by a corporation/made using something produced by a corporation ever again.
Global dimming, and this article, are actually based on real facts.
Pro-tip: "facts" aren't things which just happen to match your personal world view. Or: why confirmation bias is something to try and avoid.
Oh, and BTW, if you'd read the whole summary, you'd note that a) the himalayan glaciers are melting *much* faster than any others on the planet, well above the rate expected when global warming is taken into account, and b) soot can only attribute for about half the melting, leaving the other half to... you guessed it, global warming.
Lastly: The earth is not cooling. No, it really isn't. You can say it is over and over, chanting it with the rest of your denier friends, as I'm sure doing so makes you feel better, not to mention so very superior, but it's a lie, plain and simple.
renewable energy
A marketing fad suggesting that the second law of thermodynamics is not valid. That said, the core problem is that growth is not sustainable, but everybody tries to deny it.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Back in 1970, at Resolute Bay in the Canadian high arctic, I had a discussion with two scientists about global warming -- back then, the Arctic Ocean had increased in temperature by 2.7 degrees over the previous 40 years!!! One identified mechanism was soot from the atmosphere, a byproduct of combustion and to a lesser extent, volcanic ash. The amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of an entire ocean by this amount is staggering...
This soot reduces the albedo of the snow and ice, resulting in less incident energy being reflected back into space and the unreflected energy raising the local temperature.
For anyone who cares to look, "global warming" is a function of very many causes creating a frightening synergy, greenhouse gasses though probably being the main culprit.
This is more relevant to western society:
Pollution Clouds over the U.S.
Glacial Melting in Greenland
We have to act fast! To get started, you can get a great deal on LED lightbulbs through my eBay storefront!
So when we see scientists trying to come up with excuses for why ice packs are melting without a huge increase in global temperatures, we need to question both their motives and their data.
A few simple points that are (surprisingly, still) worth mentioning. Scientists are not coming up with "excuses" for the melting of ice packs. They are observing it and developing explanations based on models. You may personally believe that the melting of ice packs would require "huge" (conveniently unquantified) temperature increases to happen, but I'm willing to bet you personal beliefs in this matter are not based on rigorous observation and mechanistic explanations of the system. The questioning of the data used by scientists to come up with the said explanations has to be addressed in an individual basis. I'm certainly supportive that not only data from global warming research, but all publicly funded research be openly available, but it is utterly naive to think that the all conclusions presented in published peer-reviewed articles would not be supported if these data were available (and it's deceptive, at the least, to question their conclusions without even knowing their contents). The questioning of the motives of the scientific community to fabricate the conclusion of ice packs melting due to anthropogenic climate change is, in my opinion, one of the weakest arguments of denialists. Conspiracy theories abound, but no one seems to find the underlying motives that lead this entire scientific community to take on the daunting task of misleading the world's population, while doing it under the public's scrutiny and very aptly covering its tracks. Staging the moon-landing is child's play compared to this.
Yes, we can see oceanic water levels rising *in certain localized areas*, but we aren't seeing the massive deluge that was predicted.
Hopefully we can finally put to bed the reality of global warming and focus on the real problem of global pollution.
How on Earth the oceanic water levels will rise *in certain localized areas* is beyond me. Unless your theory accounts for a substantial increase in oceanic water viscosity as well, although that might explain why the current rises in ocean levels have failed to meet your expectations. And, according to recent EPA definitions, the problem of global warming caused by CO2 emissions *is* "the real problem of global pollution".
Incidentally, everyone is naturally entitled to their opinions, but I prefer anthropogenic global warming denialism when it's devoid of blatant logical inconsistencies.
Global average temperature has fallen last three years, you say earth is warming. one of us has problem with "facts". Guess that fact doesn't coincide with your Al Gore Climatology religion's world view.
"And if solar cycles are the cause, there's not a darn thing humans can do about it except adapt."
you really believe that?
if climate change threatens our economic well being, you rest assured that century or two of focused scientific innovation and politically supported engineering and industrial policies will, without a doubt, counteract natural changes, like a cooling or a heating solar cycle cause
nuclear detonations at volcanic regions to cool things down under cloud cover (study factual little ice ages after massive historical volcanic eruptions in man's historical written record)
purposeful amping up of CO2 output to greenhouse effect heat things up
there's all sorts of things we can do
we have amazing technological abilities compared to just a century ago, nevermind what powers we will discover in another century or two
in 2 or 3 centuries, this entire planet will have a micromanaged climate, if civilization doesn't break down. then the issue will be political bickering between, for example, morocco wishing to do away with more sahara so it can can grow more crops, while brazil says this costs them money to counteract the related drying up of the amazon due to morocco's efforts. we already see this sort of environmental bickering between nations over the damming and controlling of rivers that cross national boundaries
lets put it this way: our ancestors would be in amazed awe at our ability to completely redirect an entire river if we wanted to, and as we frequently do in today's world. but ancient man, in looking at the hard work of beavers, would not think it in the realm of the impossible for us to do that one day
likewise, today, looking at how past volcanic eruptions have led to mini-ice ages, i, like ancient man before me looking at beavers, see that future micromanaging of our climate is not impossible, and will be someday a mundane matter-of-fact effort, like garbage disposal and plumbing
you just lack imagination and perception
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Global average temperature has fallen last three years
Uh, no, it hasn't. And even if it had, let me introduce you to a concept called "noise". Or: Why three years of data doesn't represent anywhere close to a trend.
But, keep lying in the face of facts. I'm sure it makes you feel so very much better.
And when the 1st world countries started forcing scrubbers on coal-burning plants, the companies were complaining about lost profits. Somehow, things still went along.
Not a typewriter
how many hundreds? why are you so imprecise? is it 500 million? 200 million? are we forgetting 300 million due to laziness? that's just appalling.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You'll be crying when you're in the greatest depression in history. You won't have a job AND the world's farms will be turning into deserts, there will be no more fish to eat, and cows will be illegal to raise.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
My eyes must be playing tricks on me because I can't seem to find the sections in those links that discuss massive sea level rise occurring by 2009. Since you wrote "we aren't seeing the massive deluge that was predicted" I have to assume you weren't referring to predictions of sea level rise by 2100 (as referenced in the second of your two links) but sea level rise that would be observable today.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
that the Chinese put a railway right through the middle of Tibet either.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Slashdot is full of people who support or deny AGW on faith. They think it is because of "all that science", but in reality it is because "the TV said so".
(No, not you reading this of course, but all the rest [climatologists excluded]).
Could you resist public opinion, if reality did not match that opinion? Are you sure?
She made the willows dance
And the proponents of AGW have known about this for at least 6 years. And it was (as I recall) in the "mainstream" back then, if I recall correctly.
Get your facts straight before you start preaching. Not all glaciers are melting.
Corporations != the free market. There was capitalism before we became the corporate state we (the U.S.) are now.
Corporations != the free market. I am not in favor of communism, I am in favor of taking power away from huge corporations and reducing their role in government.
a handful of emails? I take it you haven't actually studied any of the content that was released, have you?
You haven't addressed the secondary issue; that the melting in the Himalayas is only doubled by the soot, not caused by it.
What about the third issue of declining precipitation? So now we have soot and declining levels of precipitation, the rest is caused by global warming.
Oh wait...
Let's not forget about all the ice cores taken from scientists...
So now we have soot, declining levels of precipitation, ice core holes, the rest is caused by global warming.
Of course, there is the increased travel from those scientists who are drilling holes as well as the increase in tourism...
So now we have soot, declining levels of precipitation, ice core holes, increase in tourism and the rest is caused by global warming.
You know what.. there are thousands of reasons as to why the ice cap on the Himalayas may be decreasing. It doesn't really matter as long as we end it with "and the rest is caused by global warming."
(why am I reminded of a scene from "The Jerk"?)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
We have to stop the silly bickering about 'Global Warming/Climate Change'.
I think that most people are willing to
1) accept that our current consumption and development patterns are largely rooted in the availability of cheap oil and/or coal, and
2) agree that burning these fuels (indiscriminately) is both wasteful and polluting.
I'm going out on a limb here but also I think that few people truly understand the benefits/significance of carbon-trading.
IMHO, we need to first focus on making small changes that reduce our utter dependence upon fossil fuels. And then tackle the larger issues.
In the meantime, I fear that, collectively, we've got our heads in the sand and, in the absence of a 'global' solution, will risk doing nothing at all.
This sure is a god-awful straw man argument.
Again, corporations != the free market! Capitalism sure as hell exists beyond this. The problem with corporations (I usually mean multi-nationals when I say this) is the concentration of power and the fact that the can so much power in government that they essentially rule countries. Small corporations and small businesses can't do that.
Calling it melting is prejudicial (because it implies melting due to warming), it's termed glacial retreat and in most cases, there are valid reasons for this not associated with "Global Warming". For instance, the glaciers on Kilimanjaro are retreating because the rain forest at the bottom was destroyed which drastically reduced the amount of precipitation on the mountain's slopes. Less precipitation == less liquid to freeze, so the water lost to the summer temperatures was simply not replaced.
Interestingly, the cost of replacing the stoves causing the Himalayan pollution (it is believed that most of the soot is not from large scale generation, but from household stoves - individually they're not that significant, but there's a hell of a lot of people in that part of the world) has been estimated at $15 billion. This seems like a good use of resources to me, rather than fantasy schemes like cap and trade.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Corporations != the free market. There was capitalism before we became the corporate state we (the U.S.) are now.
Very true. Also, small business simply can not produce things like computer processors, RAM, hard drives and the infrastructure that has produced the Internet. All of these things are used to post on Slashdot.
It gets old having to listen to people bitch about the evil corporations while happily using their products to do it. I'm reminded of my wife's graduation in Michigan. Dick Cheney was speaking so, of course, there were protesters. One tried to hand me a pamphlet concerning the evils of the oil companies. I had to stop her and ask her how she got to the rally. Of course, it was Michigan in the winter so it was pretty obvious that she drove. I don't think she ever got the irony of her driving her car to protest oil companies.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the Earth isn't a closed system.
We get an external energy input from the Sun, and emit energy into space. The amount of energy on the planet isn't constant. We could make it grow by reflecting less, or making it shrink by say, launching chunks of coal into space, or reflecting more energy.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
Hear, hear!
The sea level rises mentioned in the IPCC reports are measured in centimeters over decades in the worst case scenarios, which isn't exactly the end of the world.
Measurements (i.e. the instrumental record) of sea levels is 1.1mm per year steady for the last 20 years. The real dangers of melting glaciers is the effect of (probably localised) changes in the salinity of the water damaging ecosystems.
For myself, bollocks to "doom!" and "end of the world" predictions associated with climate change. The real issue with carbon dioxide production is the acidification of the oceans, and the increase in plankton and algae associated with the increase in CO2. Fish are an important part of the diet for many people all over the world, and we've done well from the ocean's bounty over the years.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
But it's estimated that this effect is only 25% of global warming.
The "new news" here apppears to be that it may be as much as half the effect, although those numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt: climate models are in general unphysical, and get more unphysical the larger the scale. So while smaller scale regional models may be more accurate, you're still comparing them to global models (to get the proportional contributions) that are only accurate by chance (and which have done rather poorly in recent comparisions to actual data on the ground.)
And in this particular case the regional models may not be so good either, precisely because they are dealing with a rich and complex geometry that is requires a lot more care that much of the globe (which is 70% water, after all, so the surface geometry is at least relatively straightforward, although the heat and mass transport at the interface is one of those places where unphysical assumptions creep in.)
Ergo, while these results are suggestive, as a basis for public policy they aren't a lot better than AGW itself.
People who believe that AGW is a scientific certainty are deluded. The W and Z bosons are scientific certainties. AGW is a plausible hypothesis. How one wants to respond to a plausible hypothesis with social and economic policy changes is far more dependent on one's political biases than on anything to do with the science.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
renewable via more direct solar input. Still more quickly replenished than oil.
Submitter, I have no trouble at all visualizing what "a massive brown cloud visible from space" would look like. I'm gonna need you though to go ahead an produce me a picture of this here event of which you speak.
the link says it all
there are engineers who get stuff done, and there are whining ignorant morons who take up space. that's pretty much the entire human race
technical universities: start assembling the geoengineering major programs of study now, to get a jump on the upcoming scholastic trend
liberal arts universities: start a program on reality tv programs. pffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Backing you up, bro.
We do need to try to separate the politics from the science. I'm an environmentalist and was pretty impressed when I first read of this "Al Gore" character from an old ecology book from the late 80s/early 90s who was also into ecology and was working on a way to translate it into a way politicians and industrialists could give a rats' ass about.
Yes, what he came up with was an oversimplification, and a brilliant one at that. It's not often you can target one metric and have it achieve multiple goals: discourage fossil fuel consumption (which we've already been burned on several times in the past), coal consumption, encourage alternative energy development (which otherwise wouldn't be able to compete with dirty energy without factoring in the cost to "clean up" after the cheap stuff), and reduce other pollutants linked to CO2 generation (which would be a pain to go after individually).
I don't think global warming is that much of a concern compared to all of the other beneficial side effects of CO2 cap-n-trade. Hell, even Gore's presentation itself said the that even under worse case projections we wouldn't feel anything for at least a century. But without any kind of policy change, the question is when, not if. It would be nice if we could institute some kind of policy /before/ things get bad, but looking at the history of environmental law, nothing will happen until something bad happens and people start dying. Industrial pollution wasn't regulated until people started suffocating and dying in the yellow London fogs at the last turn of the century, CFCs weren't eliminated until the ozone hole opened wide, agricultural runoff and oyster dredging in the Chesapeake was not curtailed until red tides suffocated and destroyed prime fishing spots.
The, um, anti-environmental crowd knows this, and can keep piling on FUD behind the science to keep any new environmental policy from passing until it's too late and damage has been definitively done -- again when, not if. The only real question is who will take the blame and have to pay to clean up when we do start feeling the effects of climate change. This "ClimateGate" scandal is pure gold for them, because instead of them saying "yeah, you were right, our greed and laziness are destroying the planet", they can say "we were on the path to destruction and we would have changed course if only you hadn't lied on all the science that could have saved us!". So they really have nothing to lose and everything to gain through their current denial stance.
Which again just means we have to separate the science from the politics. Their are a lot of politically expedient avenues to take, where you are allowed to fight dirty and appeal to people's hearts. But frankly it annoys me when they try to blend climate science together with political rhetoric... I don't care about evaluating my lifestyle in terms of a "carbon footprint" and don't care to measure energy efficiency of appliances in terms of carbon emissions! I just want to live efficiently with minimal waste!
(I usually mean multi-nationals when I say this)
That's plutocracy.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You forgot to add WINE!!!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I am in favor of taking power away from huge corporations and reducing their role in government.
As am I, but in a globally-connected world I see this as a prisoners' dilemma: all countries must do it together, or some countries corporations will gain the advantage.
And that's not even counting countries like the PRC, where most large corps are owned by the gov't (usually in the form of the PLA) and thus want these companies to have a lot of power...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You mean using the existing solar input 'better', as opposed to going to the the Sun and turning it up a notch or two, right?
sheesh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That argument would suggest that we can't protest about the operators of anything that we depend on. If there's no practical choice but to use a particular company, does that mean they're therefore immune to criticism?
Something that was a bit of a surprise about a nuclear war between Pakistan and India seems to be important here as well. Nuclear war between India an Pakistan would lift quite a lot of soot into the troposphere because of all the combustible material in cities. It turns out that solar heating of that soot causes the heated air parcels to rise into the stratosphere. That means that the soot does not fall out right away and is spread over the globe, blocking sunlight and cooling the planet enough to cause crop failure and famine around the world. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47829/story.htm
This same mechanism is playing a similar though smaller role here by causing stronger updrafts. Interesting confirmation.
It's actually the Libertarians that are pushing much of this. They are currently allied with the "right wingers" as many of their goals are the same (smaller government, free market, local control).
And, as is typical of the ideological zealot, any evidence which may cast doubt on the practicality of their goals is rationalised away. Or just outright denied, and the messengers attacked.
If this was presented as a pollution problem, you could get the right-wingers on board. After all, Edmund Muskie sponsored the Clean Water Act in 1971, and despite Nixon's veto it was overrriden and became law. Republican members pretty much have supported it. When the EPA gets back to pollution control, they will find many right-wingers willing to support these efforts.
Sadly, they will also find many right- and left-wingers unwilling to pretend that any pollution controls within the U.S. will solve any significant global pollution problems. The developing countries will resist joining in, as it will raise costs and diminish growth, and China is quite literally a black hole of pollution with no intention of limiting growth or raising costs to even halt the increases, much less reduce.
In a way, we are entering a perfect storm of globalization, massive industrial development, fossil fuels as a
cheap path to industrial prosperity, and the attendant rise in global pollution and genuine climate impact. CO2 is not so much of a problem as particulates, but it is much easier to sell punishing the developed countries rather than set new standards and prevent the avalance of underdeveloped countries spewing so much more. China will eclipse the US in this impact, if they haven't already, and we have no prospects of limiting their spew. Africa is next, and more is the pity, since Africa could be a miraculous eco-economy if they could bear to live a little below their industial potential and stop killing one another so wantonly. South American is well on its way to completely developing their lands, with the requisite loss of habitat and forest. We may one day realize that the deforestation of the Amazon did more to ruin Earth than every car and coal power plant ever built. And there are other forests under attack.
If were only so simple, but this global problem is not being addressed globally yet. And I see little hope for it to be so any time soon. Many developing countries want to 'get theirs', and get it now, figuring they can get the developed countries to either give up theirs, or fix it in technology. We might be able to, but probably not, unless it is a truly global solution. And there is no forum to discuss this honestly, so it will continue.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Anyone who has lived in a snow prone city in the spring will tell you that the soot covered snow is the last to melt.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That argument would suggest that we can't protest about the operators of anything that we depend on. If there's no practical choice but to use a particular company, does that mean they're therefore immune to criticism?
Well, there is old adage, "don't bite the hand that feeds you". Sure, if there were only one oil company, one computer company or one *whatever* company, sure, then you may complain all you want. But as long as there is competition, if you don't like the services or the actions of one company, use another. That's how the free market works. However, if you take the free market away and put the government in charge of everything, there's really not a damn thing you can do if you don't like it, especially if that "government" is completely unelected, like the UN's IPCC.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
No matter what the verdict, fact is: we are putting to much polution into the atmosphere and we need to stop.
Really? Because I thought we were trying to reduce CO2, which we breathe out and plants like a lot.
If you really want to stop pollution, then you better get on with changing the AGW people's minds because they are doing nothing to address pollution that's not "CO2 pollution". Like black soot...
But that's what happens when you decide the science is settled and don't let people ask questions about what is really the root issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, sometimes it's the shareholders who bear the burden. It all depends on the demand elasticity of the product. Of course, if you want to see the shareholders, you have to look no further than your retirement funds...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
First of all, the economy can kill itself much better than any CO2 reductions could. Second, you already predicted the destruction of the economy when "alarmists" called for cleaner air - talk about an alarmist. And third: how much will it cost to deal with runaway Global Warming?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Corporations != the free market. There was capitalism before we became the corporate state we (the U.S.) are now.
But free market --> Corporations IOW capitalism kills itself. Thanks for admitting that.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Here's where common sense disappears completely. The ONLY power a corporation has comes as a result of YOU buying their products. If you don't want them to have power stop buying their stuff.
You won't do that though, because you cannot live without the conveniences they provide for you, but keep crying a river about people having money and power YOU voluntarily gave to them. If you truly hated corporations then you would change your lifestyle to one not completely dependent on them.
How about not electing government officials that take bribes from corporations? You can't blame corporations for the actions of politicians.
Your hate of corporations is ill-founded.
Yeah, exactly, only 99% of the glaciers are melting! That's not what I call a consensus!
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Which "last three years" are you cherry-picking? 2006 through 2008? 2008 was a La Nina year.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Calling it melting is prejudicial (because it implies melting due to warming), it's termed glacial retreat and in most cases, there are valid reasons for this not associated with "Global Warming". For instance, the glaciers on Kilimanjaro are retreating because the rain forest at the bottom was destroyed which drastically reduced the amount of precipitation on the mountain's slopes. Less precipitation == less liquid to freeze, so the water lost to the summer temperatures was simply not replaced.
Interestingly, the cost of replacing the stoves causing the Himalayan pollution (it is believed that most of the soot is not from large scale generation, but from household stoves - individually they're not that significant, but there's a hell of a lot of people in that part of the world) has been estimated at $15 billion. This seems like a good use of resources to me, rather than fantasy schemes like cap and trade.
I agree with 98% of what you just said.
The only thing I would counter-argue is: Calling it "glacial retreat" is prejudicial, it makes it sound as if it is is isolated from all impact of human activity.
I'd figure that "melting" is cause neutral, technically accurate, and generally safe for conversation. But that may be a side effect of where I live, here people who put salt on their sidewalks watch the ice melt without the temperature changing.
But to get a strong point across "Pollution based erosion" wins every time, it gets across the point of "hey dummies, this is our fault" without feeding the political boogie man of global warming.
And when the 1st world countries started forcing scrubbers on coal-burning plants, the companies were complaining about lost profits. Somehow, things still went along.
Of course the greedy sh*twads have saved themselves a nice portion of the expense by dumping the contaminated scrub-water unfiltered into rivers.
I say make 'em bleed and shoot the whiners.
that is, a post that has to loudly and voluminously announce how much they don't care
paraphrasing shakespeare: methinks the lady doth protest too much
hey, genius, if you didn't care... YOU WOULDN'T POST
proof of not caring is not commenting, not being here
there really are people who don't care about this debate. those people are playing videogames or twiddling on facebook right now. if they saw this thread, they wouldn't even roll their eyes (too much caring in that effort), they'd just click away, truly uninterested. meanwhile, you: you're deep in a thread writing a large comment about how much you don't care. no one is holding a gun to your head to post a comment, friend
fact: if you comment, emotionally, voluminously, AND WITH ALL CAPS, you obviously fucking care
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thoughtful people are slowly, slowly awakening to the idea that the climate alarmists predicting doom for the planet's climate may be less than completely right. Previously, the melting of the himalayan glaciers was positively, definitely, absolutely, without doubt, guaranteed attributable 100 percent to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. The simple fact is that nothing technical that supports the AGW theory that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from "pre-industrial" levels to the current level has caused (or even contributed to) any measurable amount of planetary warming. Similarly, there is nothing to support the popular idea that some arbitrary co2 concentration is necessary to maintain our current planetary climate conditions. Our current knowledge of the things that might affect the Earth's climate, and the magnitude of their effect, is primitive, and dominated scientifically by the equivalent of 15th-century flat-earthers. Go to the NSIDC (http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/) website and read their 'news and analysis' to see how they spin every little uptick in the arctic ice cover. Would you trust agenda-driven people like that to tell the unvarnished scientific truth about...anything? They are the technical equivalent of eugenics people excavating an african anthropological site. If the Earth's climate continues to cool (as it has for the last two years) they will keep spinning it as validation of their models, right up until their funding dries up and they have to pull the power plug on their computer and website. Anyone (Al Gore comes to mind) who claims to know all, or even any, of the answers to global climate change is being blatantly dishonest. It was hysterically funny to see record low temperatures and snow visit Copenhagen at the same time that planetary leaders were meeting there to discuss global warming.
My eyes must be playing tricks on me because I can't seem to find the sections in those links that discuss massive sea level rise occurring by 2009
Most of what is discussed in these articles is not prediction at all, but innuendo. I particularly like this snippet:
Warning signs today:
Global sea level has already risen by 4 to 8 inches in the past century, and the pace of sea level rise appears to be accelerating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise 10 to 23 inches by 2100, but in recent years sea levels have been rising faster than the upper end of the range predicted.
In the 1990s, the Greenland ice mass remained stable, but the ice sheet has increasingly declined in recent years. This melting currently contributes an estimated one-hundredth of an inch per year to global sea level rise.
Greenland holds 10 percent of the total global ice mass. If it melts, sea levels could increase by up to 21 feet.
The first bullet point is the required comment found in every pro-AGW story that the IPCC scientists have no clue at all what is going on with the Earth's climate, since their every prediction is wrong. For some reason I don't understand the entire incredibly complex system is reduced to a single axis labeled "worse" on one end and "better" on the other, with the errors always tending to be that the global aggregate situation is much further toward the "worse" end than the most carefully unphysical computational models suggest.
The second bullet point gives some relevant information without embellishment.
The third bullet point is pure speculation, and has as much to do with "Warning Signs Today" as would a comment that there is a 1:250000 chance of an asteroid impact in 2029. It is included purely for the scare value, as neither unphysical models nor actual data plausibly suggest that the Greenland icecap is likely to melt in the next 100 years, and even if they did the fact that it would raise sea levels by 23 meters is by no stretch of the imaginatoin related to any "Warning Signs Today." It is, like so much of the discussion related to AGW, simply thrown in as a scare tactic, like McCarthy talking about Communists.
Anti-AGW folks are afraid of economic risks, pro-AGW folks are afraid of climate risks. Both insist that the precautionary principle only be applied to the risks they care about, because who really gives a shit about what those liberal/fascist/pinko/greedy bastards on the other side want?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
How many people have a choice though when it comes to say MS and their locked in proprietary formats that you may need for work or to communicate with other businesses? The so called "free market," is empirically actually quite a bit less free than idealist Libertarians state it is. Much like Communism pure Libertarianism looks good on paper, and in practice? Not so much...
And p.s. have fun driving on government paved roads, and eating your lunch which is poison free thanks to FDA inspections, and withdrawing money from your government propped up bank because free market capitalists were so Fing stupid about about "commercial paper," while you bitch about the terrible, horrible, government.
Anyone who is actually paying attention to the way the world actually works and who doesn't have an ideological axe to grind realizes a mixed economy that preserves competition, but that also has regulations like Glass Stegall, environmental regulations, and a basic social safety net is more stable, sustainable, and provides a better quality of life for it's citizens. Communism vs. laisez affair capitalism is a false dilemma for neither of those has been shown to work by history. A mix of small businesses, co-op, and regulated big businesses with unions and a social safety net OTOH seem to come through with both the innovation that the market drives and a decent sustainable standard of living for all.
Europe ring a bell?
Hopefully all you net.libertrains.greed.greed.greed learned something about the fallibility of markets in the last 24 month of market crash fail. You so called conservatives do care about stability and prudence don't you ala Edmunde Burke, don't you? Or is your dirty little secret that you call yourself "conservatives" but are really advocates of unstable constant churning change? Make sure to say hi to the kids in Bhopal and Shell's Nigeria the next time you genuflect before large corporations. K, thks, by
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Lastly: The earth is not cooling. No, it really isn't. You can say it is over and over, chanting it with the rest of your denier friends, as I'm sure doing so makes you feel better, not to mention so very superior, but it's a lie, plain and simple
The oceans appear to be warming, so if by "the heat content of the oceans and atmosphere is increasing" it is probably correct to say "the Earth is not cooling".
The "global dimming" question is a curious one. So far as I know the situation is still that earthshine measurements indicate the Earth's albedo is increasing, while satellite measurements over the same time suggest it is very slightly decreasing. Sometimes the fact is that we have two reasonably good measures of the same thing and they disagree with each other. In that case it is simply anti-scientific to assert that one or the other result is a fact and the other is not. Both are facts. We just don't know how to reconcile them.
Science provides knowledge, not certainty.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"yeah, you were right, our greed and laziness are destroying the planet"
Are you so sure of this that you think the only problem with Al Gore's "brilliant oversimplification" (as you call it) is that now your opposition will be able to *pretend* not to see your truth by pointing to the problems with the oversimplified science backing up your case?
This doesn't sound so good. And the worrying thing for me about the Climategate emails is that they contain indication that this type of thinking may possibly even have subverted pertinent climatologists.
Honestly, shouldn't the lesson rather be that if you want people to take you seriously you must avoid oversimplifications, produce rigorous and transparent science and focus political recommendations to (as I read your post) the points where you *really have a case*?
Government power is always purchased by those with the most money. So the only way to reduce corporate power through government is to reduce government power.
Anti-AGW folks are afraid of economic risks, pro-AGW folks are afraid of climate risks.
I guess I'll have to be the one million and first person to say this: Climate risks are economic risks. Big ones. Increasing numbers of business leaders are coming to the conclusion that a somewhat bigger slice of a much shittier global economy is not a good deal. Droughts, famine, coastal flooding, climate refugees, skyrocketing insurance claims, and resource wars do not make for a friendly economic climate.
If even 10% of the climate "doomsday scenario" outcomes turn out to be true, things are going to get very difficult for the average middle class schmo, even if they are lucky enough to live in an area relatively unaffected by direct environmental impacts.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Corporations != the free market. There was capitalism before we became the corporate state we (the U.S.) are now.
But free market --> Corporations IOW capitalism kills itself. Thanks for admitting that.
You missed a step or two. Free market --> government intervention --> Corporations --> more government intervention --> Fascism.
And another comparison you may want to think about: decentralizing government --> more freedom vs. centralizing government --> tyranny.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The primary dangers in sea-level rise are "tipping points" (a term I, for some reason, dislike) -- sharp nonlinear transitions. The simple progression of sea level rise gives you very little sea level rise, but if you cross a threshold where a lot of land-bound ice melts over a period of time, you can suddenly (in the climatological/geological sense of "suddenly") get substantial ocean rise.
The IPCC reports correctly point out that there are quite a few potentially negative tipping points (and a few positive ones) that we may be approaching, but predicting what exactly will happen with them is extremely difficult. The major risk they present is in their unpredictability. Even the IPCC "worst-case" scenarios are not actually worse-case, because they (rightly) do not include these unpredictable transitions.
So do you actually believe ice core sampling holes will have a statistically measurable impact on total global ice volume, or is this some weak attempt at a troll?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
So what you're saying is we should build MORE power plants to allow these people to switch to electrical stoves? Yeah, the alarmists will love that!
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
I don't think global warming is that much of a concern compared to all of the other beneficial side effects of CO2 cap-n-trade.
I know, right? Al Gore will make millions, even billions. And Maurice Strong will rule the world and Edward De Rothschild will control all the money. Woohoo! Global despotism FTW! /p
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
What has that to do with third-world people riding in smokey diesel buses, using kerosene cook stoves, oil lamps and wood fireplaces for heat?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Could you please source that number?
it's in my head
Don't mod me down, I realize I'm leaving a lot out, and sometimes the only choices are to pass costs along or go out of business. But it makes at least as much sense as the mindless meme the parent parroted
You mean like this?
Oh, and as for soot: while it may be news here, it was widely covered by the IPCC. See AR4 WG1 Ch. 2 Sec 2.5.4, "Radiative Forcing by Anthropogenic Surface Albedo Change: Black Carbon in Snow and Ice". They cite five different papers. Evidence for forcing is classified as "B" (moderate), consensus "3", (insufficient consensus), level of scientific understanding is "Low". In the next IPCC report, given the sizable number of papers that have come out since that, that'll probably be bumped up to "A", '2", "Moderate", and the net forcing contribution will probably be bumped up to about 0.5 W/m^2 (out of ~2.6 net and ~1.7 for CO2).
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
It's actually the Libertarians that are pushing much of this. They are currently allied with the "right wingers" as many of their goals are the same (smaller government, free market, local control).
And, as is typical of the ideological zealot, any evidence which may cast doubt on the practicality of their goals is rationalised away. Or just outright denied, and the messengers attacked.
You mean like Barbara Boxer calling for an investigation and prosecution of the people that leaked the CRU emails?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Well, there is old adage, "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
A rather unfortunate way to look at the relationship between the people and the business giants. Businesses should exist for the benefit of the population, not the other way round.
But as long as there is competition, if you don't like the services or the actions of one company, use another.
And what if they all do the same thing? More interestingly, what if it's to your personal advantage to go with company A even if everyone making that decision would do harm overall? (Aka the "prisoner's dilemma").
As for your other statements:
Pure free market vs government control of everything is a false dichotomy, you can have a regulated market for example.
The IPCC isn't a government - it can't create laws. Any government acting on its advice may or may not be elected, depending on where you live, but that's true regardless.
I thought global warming wasn't happening?
I think that most people are willing to
2) agree that burning these fuels (indiscriminately) is both wasteful and polluting.
No, why on earth would people be willing to accept that?
Cheap energy is the single biggest reason for the incredible technological development we've seen since the industrial revolution. THAT SAME TECHNOLOGY has gotten rid of most of the pollution we used to have, fixed "a few" diseases, raised the standard of living, put more people above the poverty line than ever etc etc.
That same technology can do the same for the rest of the world as well. At the same time, we're (still thanks to a cheap energy source!) able to further our technological progress and thus we're soon (two decades) able to use other forms of energy cheaply as well.
We want to get to that point as FAST as possible. Not as slow as possible.
it's in my head
But - and I cannot stress this enough - we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future..
But in the book of Hansen et. .al does it not also say that Thine Global Climate Models art in good agreement with the most holy of temperature reconstructions? Surely the divinely inspired scriptures of Science can not contradict one another, for Science is proven truth.
I appreciate your points, and am convinced the underlying evidence supports the notion that unprecedented AGW is unproven. I am more saddened though by the entirety of the debate reverting to the same tired arguments we saw in the dark ages over how holy books should be interpreted and which priests and prophets really were authoritative. Anyone thinking that the scientific method could overcome flaws in human nature must be having their souls crushed by the debates being run today.
There's a lot of error in this thread so please, allow me to correct the situation. First, all glaciers melt. Whether a glacier advances or retreats depends on whether the current melting rate is faster than the rate at which the ice is replenished. Doubling the melt rate from soot contamination can explain glacial retreat all by itself, merely, because it is a substantial increase in the rate at which the glacier melts without a corresponding increase in ice replenishment.
Second, soot production doesn't correlation with CO2 emissions. Yes, they both require the burning of of a carbon-containing material (well, there are some other CO2 emission sources, like concrete manufacture and bakeries) but they are relatively minor), but soot comes from a small amount of inefficient combustion (and can vary greatly in concentration) while CO2 can come from both efficient or inefficient combustion. What that means is that you can have considerable soot production from a relatively small portion of overall production of CO2. In particular, reducing soot production doesn't imply that you reduce overall CO2 emissions or vice versa.
If all companies implement the policy that I don't agree with, what should I do? Start my own oil company? Start my own telco?
Except that the globe is cooling, in fact the big question is whether this cooling is weather or is it climate.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yeah the bankers choosing the wrong algorithms to calculate risk on derivatives, a speculative real estate bubble, and no background check loans for houses had nothing to do with the crash right Curunir wolf? Note these actions were all chosen freely by market actors with no government coercion involved whatsoever. Even the Libertarians big hero Alan Greenspan admitted there was a "flaw," after the crash, look it up if you don't believe me. The problem with conservative Libertarians is you guys are all about responsibility until *you guys* fuck up, and then guess what, it's the "gubmints" fault. How about banksters and real estate agents looking in the mirror and manning up about a serious screw up? Too bad tax payers were left holding the bag on that one, I read for 1.4 trillion we could have paid off *all* Americans sub prime mortgages thus preventing Americans from being foreclosed *and* bailing out the banksters sketchy derivatives. Of course that makes too much sense because it benefits everyone as opposed to a chosen few rich people, right?
And note I actually cheer on Ron Paul and Libertarians when they challenge empire abroad, and police state at home and challenge why a private bank the Federal Reserve mints our money, that is all good stuff. Too bad your faith in the 100% rationality of market actors is so misplaced. Hint greed distorts peoples ability to choose rationally during bubbles which occur often, look up "irrational exuberance."
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
1. When all candidates have corporate ties, whom to pick?
... It's a company that doesn't care at all about its customers; there can be lines with dozen-or-two people in them, yet only 4 out of 16 registers work. And it's not rare!
2. When you have only enough money for the cheapest, poorest product, how can you justify not going to the store with worst policies?
3. In IT world, it's pretty usual that just one company produces the product you need. How to avoid purchasing from, say, Microsoft if only Microsoft supplies Halo or whatever? How to avoid purchasing XBox if you want to play Halo?
You're assuming people everywhere and in every field have choice. Maybe you have enough grocery stores in U.S., and maybe you have a car. Maybe you have multiple gas companies in U.S. Some countries have many more monopolies or near-monopolies. Why I'm continuously speaking of grocery stores? Because I shop at one that it so obviously and disgustingly manipulating prices and their shoppers, so obviously collecting loads of info about customers via loyalty card while they get almost nothing in return
Yet it's the nearest one, the cheapest one, and with their own two "hyper-cheap" labels. How can I justify spending extra half an hour to get to second nearest shop?
How can I justify not releasing game product for Windows (and implicitly, getting Windows for mingw development)?
So, when corporation X starts poisoning your river for its smelter, and you can't actually stop buying their product because you haven't actually ever bought their product, how will this help you to get them to stop poisoning your river?
Corporations wield power because of the wealth they accumulate from selling product. It is pretty idealistic to believe that a consumer boycott of a raw material by that corporation can force them to make changes.
Of course, if corporations actually followed the rules like everyone else, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
Well, why do the "skeptics" only quote the same handfull of emails, not the hundreds released?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
... are you one of the people who feed off of the trickle down from folks like http://www.google.com/search?q=Exxon+CEO ?
I don't really understand how Gore will amass a fortune from pushing forward environmental policy (administration fees? bribes?) but he seems pretty well off already. And you know, out of all the politicians I've read about he's probably the only one I'd trust to put his resources to good use.
But yeah, the system needs more work to separate the politics / power from the finance / money.
No! Global warming is clearly true. My evidence: The planet has been getting warmer ever since the end of the last ice age! And the population has been growing ever since, too. Ergo, people are causing global warming!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The first bullet point is the required comment found in every pro-AGW story that the IPCC scientists have no clue at all what is going on with the Earth's climate, since their every prediction is wrong.
Quite to the contrary, all assessments in the IPCC report are given with an appropriate levels of "understanding", "confidence", "consensus", and so forth. Some elements have very high degrees of understanding, confidence, and consensus (for example, the direct forcing from CO2). Others do not (for example, the cloudcover feedback response).
Do realize, however, that any errors are just as likely to be *worse* as they are than better. In fact, "worse" has happened notably more often than better -- sea level rise, temperature rise, etc.
For some reason I don't understand the entire incredibly complex system is reduced to a single axis labeled "worse" on one end and "better" on the other
You're treading into a philosophical debate here, but basically, would you consider drought, flood, desertification, disease, pestilence, etc, bad things? Then that's "worse". And it's not so much that there's something inherently bad about a warmer world. To the contrary, warmer world tend to support more biomass and biodiversity. The problem is simply that it's not the world that we, our society, or the rest of the life on this planet are adapted to. Furthermore, the problem is not the change itself, but how rapid it is. We haven't seen change like this since the PETM. Was the Eocene somehow "worse" than the Paleocene? I seriously doubt you could make that claim. But from the perspective of many species alive during the Paleocene, it absolutely was worse. The oceans acidified, climate patterns changed (some irreversibly), whole ecosystems were disrupted. Life itself survived and flourished, but that'd be no comfort to you if your species went extinct.
than the most carefully unphysical computational models suggest.
What are you using "unphysical" for? They're physics sims. In fact, if you look at the code, what's most remarkable is how *few* aspects of the climate system are coded based on statistical observational models or the like. The overwhelming majority of it goes straight back to First Principles.
The third bullet point is pure speculation
The rates of deglaciation are very precisely measured. They're measured over time, so changes are measured to. And the total mass of the ice sheet is well measured. So what part are you calling "pure speculation"?
It is included purely for the scare value, as neither unphysical models nor actual data plausibly suggest that the Greenland icecap is likely to melt in the next 100 years
Totally melt in 100 years? No.
Partially melt in 100 years? Absolutely.
Totally or near-totally melt over hundreds of years? Yes. And if you don't trust models on it, just look at the effect of temperature changes from past glacials on Greenland ice extent. A 2C rise (which was the *goal* of Copenhagen, to limit it to "just" 2C) historically causes a 6-9m sea level rise equilibrium.
Anti-AGW folks are afraid of economic risks, pro-AGW folks are afraid of climate risks.
Climate risks are economic risks. How much do you think it'll cost to live or grow food in the desert southwest, for example, if the Colorado river flow volume declines even further? What do you think pine borer beetles are doing to the timber industry (drought + warmer winters = rapid expansion)? What do you think floods are if not huge economic damage?
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
A good definition is "energy source that is renewed at the same rate it's used". It also nicely covers using things like wood for energy, which can be either sustainable or non-sustainable.
OK, one more time "Companies don't set prices, their customers do!" (assuming a rational free market)
Rather, the customer and the company have equal weight in setting prices. In the big picture, there's no real difference between the two. It's an exchange of services, both sides have preferences and bounds, and the dealing proceeds if the price is mutually satisfactory.
That was a damn fine rant, and I'm tempted to save it. Too long for a sig, unfortunately.
I think it's stunningly short-sighted to assume that only oil company executives and their shills are opposed to a global tyrannical government.
I thought it was common knowledge that Al Gore is poised to make billions if something like cap-and-tax gets implemented - especially if it's an enforceable international treaty. He's a major owner in a British LLC doing a lot of investing in the kind of green tech that needs major subsidy, and in companies like Hara that will either make it big under cap-and-trade or fail because there's no market. He claims to give certain moneys to charities - but the charity 501-c(3) that he and his wife fully control, and he buys carbon offsets for his lavish lifestyle, but he buys them from a company that he owns.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Well this graphseems to contradict your assertion, even the NASA graph shows the 5year means could be flat, too early to tell for sure. If the PDO has in fact shifted phase, the global temps will drop towards middle 1960's levels, the ocean will cool and the water will contract lowering sea levels.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"But filtering soot by adding smokestack scrubbers (which 1st world countries started doing many decades ago) is a heck of a lot cheaper and less disruptive than destroying the world economy to eliminate CO2."
Man made aerosols have a significant cooling effect. Oblig graph. The obvious solution that is staring everyone in the face is an international ban on new coal fired plants. They were all built in my lifetime and will all need replacing in the next 30-40yrs. The western world has given the coal industry billions over the last decade for so called "clean coal" (10 billion in Australia alone), where's the beef?
Pea soupers caused by burning coal killed large numbers of people for over a century. The industry did not clean up voulentarily, it had to be forced to do it despite bogus claims it would destroy the economy and leave millions freezing to death.
Banning new coal plants will not "destroy the world economy", however it will destroy those parasitic corporations who are unwilling to change and this is why we see so much anti-science propoganda surrounding the issue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Meh, I understand the desire for small government... the less they do the less they'll f*(k things up. But as a purveyor of several fine national parks and other conservation efforts, environmental policy is one of the few things I can get behind without reservation.
As far as Gore goes, yes, conflicts of interests, maybe, but somehow I fail to see the evil in trying to get a firm that makes accounting software and a "carbon karma" bank that plants trees off the ground.
First off the coal industry not the oil industry are the main funders for anti-science propoganda (Exxonn have a large stake in both industries). Secondly they are feeding us poison.
And please the IPCC is not a government in any sense of the word, nobody is trying to take the free market away. The word "market" in "free market" refers to a set of rules for exchanging goods and services (ie: government regulation). The word "free" refers to the fact you are free to join if you play by the rules.
People want those rules changed so that unintended side effects such as AGW are minimised. But we have had this converstaion before and despite the wealth of cotra-evidence I don't expect you will change your extreme view of capitalisim that colours most of your posts and blinds you to every other issue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Companies don't set prices, their customers do!"
Yes, and that is only by virtue of government regulations restraining the power of monopolies and cartels. Competition alone is not a solution to the tradgedy of the commons, rather it's the root cause of the problem.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Meh, I understand the desire for small government... the less they do the less they'll f*(k things up. But as a purveyor of several fine national parks and other conservation efforts, environmental policy is one of the few things I can get behind without reservation.
As far as Gore goes, yes, conflicts of interests, maybe, but somehow I fail to see the evil in trying to get a firm that makes accounting software and a "carbon karma" bank that plants trees off the ground.
Well the point is that it is obvious Gore has a (major) vested interest in seeing that CO2 regulations are implemented in a specific way, whether he believes the AGW alarmism or not. And as he has recently been caught lying and misrepresenting certain findings (in the recent Copenhagen speech), it leaves him as just another opportunist with an agenda - just as motivated by greed as the oil company execs that are targeted as the enemy.
I am a long-time proponent of strong environmental policy on most issues. I have worked hard in the past for better protections for the Chesapeake Bay, one of my favorite places. It breaks my heart to see the damage done there. But this AGW panic has focused everyone on CO2 (not a real pollutant), ignoring some of the hazardous things we know are causing damage, and have shown proven results when steps are taken to reduce damage. So we vilify the oil companies and the electric companies (even with all the massive improvements they have made scrubbing the SO2 and other toxins - though that could go farther) - but the big AG companies keep pushing poisons and excessive phosphorous and GM seeds with total impunity.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Create a "level playing field" by placing an international ban on new coal fired plants and cheap, clean alternatives will sprout faster than mushrooms. It's not a matter of spending extra gazzillions replacing coal plants, every single one of them was built in my lifetime and they all need replacing in the next 3-4 decades anyway.
"investing in new technologies to eliminate existing jobs." - is at the heart of the industrial revolution and is a GoodThing(TM). For example millions of people including children are no longer needed to work the coal face by hand, a much smaller number of skilled adults with modern equipment can accomplish the same task.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
you don't know how to read the graph you linked - that solid black line plummeting downward from over 0.6 to below 0.5 is my point
Will we really be destroying the worlds economy or will we instead just be changing it? Transportation used to be built around horses and sailing vessels. That changed and we didn't destroy the economy. Why not look forward to the upcoming changes as opportunities?
I hear a lot about climate change on science programs - good ones, like the BBC or ABC radio here in Australia, not the daft Discovery Channel. I hear a lot of perspectives on facets of climate change - the various things contributing to it (both natural and artificial) and the various ways it will (and is) affect animals, plants, oceans, atmosphere, insects, migration patterns, human life, etc.
I liken life on this planet to moss clinging to a rock. "The Earth" isn't the issue - "The Earth" doesn't give a shit about the thin, wispy film of vapour and ooze that, thanks to a noisome magnetic field, hasn't yet been cleaned away by the purifying rays of solar wind.
And here we reside, for now, clucking proudly at our own existence. Point being, minute changes - of only a few degrees on average - in this vast and complex system we call "the environment" can have catastrophic effects. Point being, it's happened before, will again, and we should not take our to-date comfortable lives for granted. Point being, by talking about "fiddling" with the climate, we're playing with the only card we have.
So, to me anyway, the only clear, rational course of action is not to come up with crazy schemes to "manage" our environment. That way lies ruin and regret. The only rational course I see is to do our absolute, utter best to get the climate back to what it was - in terms of CO2 content, etc. - at pre-industrial times.
That will be our "control" environment, if you like. If the Earth still keeps warming, or cooling or turning a nice shade of purple, well then, who could argue it's not a natural phase. The bickering goes away (hopefully). But in the meantime, climate changes we are seeing are *statistically relevant* and we have *little time* to play with.
There are two roads. One, keep going as we are and hope to hell that technology will give us comfortable lives, no matter how much coastline, habitat, species and weather predictability are lost. Second road: Return the atmosphere to its pre-industrial condition and hope to hell that prevents more climate change.
Both clear and logical courses, though neither have guaranteed success. But I imagine it will be *much easier* to protect people from economic fallout from making the necessary changes, that will be protecting them from climatic fallout.
The economy has always been a tool, a figment of our imagination. Perhaps it's time to grow up as a species, put down our toys and start *thinking like a species*. That's my humble, dumb-ass, non-scientific, observer's take.
Individual businessmen (including farmers, deliverymen, etc) trading in their horses over decades is a damned sight different from being mandated to mothball huge and hugely expensive plants (aka capital plants). Where will companies get the money to build new kit when their existing plants are nowhere near their life expectancy, and the Eeeeevil Bankers will think, "If government mandates Foo this year, maybe they'll mandate Bar next year, and the Electric Company can't pay us back. So we won't lend them any money at all."
Also, there's NIMBY, which has made it impossible in the last 30 years to build new plants without decades of EPA studies and lawsuits by tree huggers.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The problem is that even the "OMG we are all going to die from Global warming" folk want someone *else* to pay the $15 billion. When push comes to shove, regardless of what people claim to believe about climate change and economic impacts, the overwhelming majority want someone else to fix it, someone else to pay for it, and someone else to inconvenienced by it.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I wouldn't worry about the fish. We would have eating or otherwise killed em all before acidification gets em.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Uh, no it doesn't. See those little blue balls? Those are temperatures! Note how they have *not* been consistently dropping for 3 years straight? How it was a drop, an increase, then another drop? And how, regardless, it all falls comfortably within the noise in the graph?
Sorry, no, the idea that the world is somehow now magically cooling because of a single cold year (the others are *well* within the trend line) is absolutely absurd, and anyone who makes that claim is either lying or completely blinded by their personal ideology.
yup. you wouldn't be the first to do so. I can think of several, at least three, telcos started in my home town since 1980. I can think of at least two oil/gas companies in the same boat. All still functioning, EXCEPT the one sold to the giant telco, though it's still operating, just under the new name.
So, feel free.
Oh, and not snarky: start an oil company that sells bio fuels made from algae. It's the wave of the future.
the market isn't free so long as slaves produce the goods.
*whoosh!*
I don't know how does it work in other countries, but in a country with 4 million people, and with prohibitively high costs of interconnection and license, and in saturated market, I don't think I stand any chance. Only a few operators exist here, and (almost?) all have foreign investors and ownership. So, no deal wrt establishing a telco in Croatia. Market is saturated, from low to high class of service.
Similar with oil company that uses bio fuel. Where and how would I breed the algae?
Not only that, you're also forgetting the fact that to enter a business, you should have either cash to throw around, or sufficient expertise to get someone to give you/lend you the cash. I have neither extra cash nor any expertise in either field. I could run an IT company, or perhaps something simple like opening a store (any kind of). But market is saturated with stores (you can walk around Zagreb and see shops opening every few months, and closing a few months later to be replaced by some other shop). So I'm left with an IT company.
Which still leaves me with depending on oil companies (thankfully, indirectly), on electrical grid operator (a monopoly with tons of corruption), on natural gas distributor (a monopoly, highly inefficient one and corrupted), etc.
I know you're just trying to be funny and are trying to slashdot-counter me. At least I hope you are. That is, I hope you are aware that USA is not the only country in the world.
I never calimed that you are free to refuse to participate. ;)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Practically nothing will be mothballed immediately. It will take 20 or 30 years to make the conversion. It's just time to get started on it. If I was a banker I sure wouldn't make loans for a fossil fuel power plant except possibly a natural gas turbine now.
Declining precipitation may well be a symptom of global warming.
"The globe is cooling" is a big denier lie. 2009 will be the 2nd or 3rd hottest year on record.
Well, there are laws against stealing data from computer systems.
So, did you look at the dotted line at the end of the black line? It shows where they expect 2009 to end up. All of your cooling has mysteriously disappeared this year.
Well, there are laws against stealing data from computer systems.
There have been a lot of people claiming they were stolen, so maybe she assumed that was the case. But emails are stolen all the time - often revealing information that Boxer is all too willing to use (without comment on how it was obtained), so long as it supports her agenda. But all of a sudden now she's concerned about unauthorized access to some other country's computers.
There was a claim of responsibility by the whistle-blower among the files.
The emails were sent to the media before they got out in public.
Plus, there are plenty of suspects.
And if you appreciate science, I found an interesting analysis from an expert (get it - he's an expert, so you can't question it without *years* of advanced study) which basically proves that it had to be an inside job.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"no one is forcing you to do anything"
Really? So increased taxes are optional? Higher power bills for all the nonsense CO2 mitigation technology is optional? What country do you live in?
-Styopa
"The globe is cooling" is a big denier lie.
if it's such a lie the why will
2009 will be the 2nd or 3rd hottest year on record.
instead of the hottest on record. Right now the 5 year mean. trend looks like it could either flat or ready to increase or decrease it's hard to tell.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
2009 will be warmer than 2008 so the globe must be warming. That makes as much sense as the 5 year mean. How many times in the past has the 5 year mean had similar waggles? It's no reason to think the long term upward trend won't continue given what we know about climate. Climate scientists often look at it in terms of 30 year trend lines. That's long enough to filter out the short term noise of natural variability such as ENSO/El Nino, PDO, solar variability, etc. that does show up in 5 year trends.
BTW, if the current El Nino lingers until March or April of 2010 it has a good chance of becoming the hottest year on record despite an unusually low solar minimum.
hahaha, a dotted black line of "expectations"? that's been the climate modellers problem all along, let's just put the "hockey stick" on that graph if wishful thinking to justify agendas is the goal
There are 5 days left in 2009. There was maybe a month to go when they added that dotted line. I think they had a pretty good idea where 2009 was going end up by then.